Author: JP

Old Man’s River: The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N

One of the principles I’m trying to stay with in this series is to ensure that whatever I recommend is generally available; while I want to share “long tail” choices rather than “hit culture” ones, there is no point my doing so unless you can borrow it or buy it.

Recommendation 5: (Book)

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. The first of a pair of books by Leo Rosten, published during the late 1930s as a compendium of articles in the New Yorker. I was fourteen when I read them, and I was fascinated by the sheer talent of the then 24-year-old Rosten. He was able to make me “hear” the accents of European immigrants wrestling with the complexities of English (albeit the American kind) while adjusting to their new and exciting world.

At that point, I’d never left India myself, and my “knowledge” of the world beyond India’s borders was marginal: largely influenced by film and magazine and book, with the occasional smattering of real-live tourists. What Leo Rosten did was to conjure up the atmosphere in the English language class in a remarkable way, somehow giving me a vicarious feel for the different cultures in that classroom, the personalities, the battles, the joys and despairs.

It is rare enough for a book to be able to do this. Rarer still for one firmly placed in the “Humour” category (I cannot bring myself to spell it Humor). And even rarer for one originally written as a series of articles.

The book is easy to read, you can choose to read it stand-alone chapter by chapter, you don’t even need to read them in sequence. But if you wanted to, you could read it cover to cover in one sitting. There is some overlap with the content and style of George Mikes, another humorist I rate highly. I cannot recommend it highly enough for someone who wants to delve into the nuances of immigrant cultures in newly-adopted lands.

Freewheeling about visualisation and manipulation tools and support for diversity

Ever since the Wii crossed our threshold, I’ve been fascinated by it. But I’ve kept away… I’m not entirely happy with the potential interaction between WiiMotes and ICDs. Nevertheless, just watching people young and old playing on the Wii, from sports to fitness to education, I felt there was something about the interaction that would have an enterprise payoff. [In the past, I’ve had a similar feeling about EyeToy, but it only went as far as considering its use as an icebreaker at offsite meetings.]

Today, thanks to a tweet from PRGeek, I went and took a look at this video. Head tracking for desktop VR displays using a WiiMote.

We’re not talking games any more. More and more, we will see enterprises spend real money on usability, on visualisation tools, on ways to support people who would otherwise be disenfranchised.

Incidentally, thanks to a tweet from LifeKludger, I went and took a look at this. Pointui. Providing “touch” features …. when you don’t have a finger….

We’re going to see a lot more of this; opportunities for us to take “consumer” tools and transform them, mutate them, into things the enterprise can use. But not every enterprise will be able to use them; we will need to understand a lot more about open architectures and reusable components before we get there; we will need to be much more agnostic about devices and platforms before we get there; and we will need to have understood the importance of enfranchising an army of people currently sidelined by our incompetence.

The eyes have it

Yesterday, as I came through immigration at Heathrow Terminal 3, the Border and Immigration Agency officer was very helpful, commenting that I should take a look at the IRIS Scheme and consider signing up. So I did. And I probably will sign up.

And in that strange serendipitous way these things happen, I came across this completely unrelated site while Stumbling (I try and Stumble for 15 minutes a day, freshens up my thinking). if you ever wanted to know just how different irises are, i guess Rankin’s research will convince you. I found the images fascinating. Here are a few examples:

Eye Scapes - 01Eye Scapes - 02Eye Scapes - 03

Rankin himself seems to be an unusual guy. I have no idea what his first name is, doesn’t appear anywhere that I could see. His bio makes interesting reading.

Old Man’s River: Electra Glide in Blue

Okay, time to move slightly further afield than is usual, even for me.

Recommendation 4: (film)

Electra Glide in Blue. Great movie, great soundtrack, great style. Every now and then, a movie comes along, and the critics say “that one’s going straight to video”. Well, when I saw this film, my immediate reaction was ‘this one’s going straight to cult classic”.

Music fans shouldn’t be surprised. The firm was produced and directed by James William Guercio. Now why does that name appear familiar? Because it was he who produced Blood Sweat and Tears and Chicago. That will give you an idea of what the music is like, and what the pace of the film is, its atmosphere and ambience. Oh, and by the way, Pete Cetera and Terry Kath have roles in the film, as also Walter Parazaider and Lee Loughnane. What’s that make, 25% of Chicago, they were such a large band….

Electra Glide in Blue. A must-see if you like Chicago or even BS&T; if you like motorcycles; if you like good-cop-befriends-hippie plots; if you like your suspense seventies-style. Oddly enough, you should think about seeing it if you were a Hill Street Blues fan: Frank Furillo has the movie poster adorning his office wall.

Information Ownership in an Information Economy: A sideways look

I’m a gregarious person: I tend to know a lot of people, and I tend to have the contact cellphone numbers for many of them. Every now and then, as a result, I get a request from Friend A, asking me for the contact numbers for Friend B. What do I do?

The first thing I try and figure out, the first gate I put the request through, is a “trusted domain” one. Do I personally know that A and B are themselves friends? If this is the case, then, most of the time, I will pass the information on. The exception is when I know that B has a different preference, explicitly shared with me, saying “Do not, under any circumstances, give my number out to others. Period.

If I am not aware of A and B themselves being friends, I do not give the information out. I offer to get in touch with B and to pass A’s contact details to her.

Wasn’t life easier when we had telephone directories and listed/unlisted numbers? Perhaps. Because now we still have the directories, but they’re personal. We still have the unlisted numbers, but they’re personally protected.

I am responsible for the contact information I hold. I am accountable for that information. Accountable to friends who have trusted me with that information. And if I pass that information on without their implicit or, in some cases, explicit, permission, I am breaking their trust in me.

This, to me, is issue number one to do with any debate on information “ownership”.

Trust.

And it’s a biggie.

When I hold information that has been given to me by someone, and where that information is “privately” held by that someone, then I am given it within a trust relationship. It is not mine to do with as I please.

That’s the simple part, when I am dealing with information as a steward, when “ownership” is clear. So let’s try a case where there is no such clear ownership. Let’s take, as an example, the record of my purchases at Amazon. Now I would argue that it is my information, and that Amazon should let me move that information around as I please. In fact, this sort of thing is one of the premises of VRM, a project you should all get to know, a project you should all get involved in.

So where was I? Oh yes, Amazon. Wanting to move “my” information around. Wanting to share information to do with Amazon purchases with others. Others like Barnes and Noble and Abebooks and Borders. As you can imagine, Amazon aren’t likely to be greatly enamoured of this idea. But it will happen. In the same way as cellphone numbers became portable across networks, in the same way as avatars are becoming portable across virtual worlds, in the same way as Sony joined the crowd and said “No DRM” today. Information portability is no longer an “if”, it’s a “when”.

But hang on a second, I hear you say. Surely that’s unfair on poor Amazon. After all, they’ve spent real money building all this infrastructure and developing all this software to track you and your purchases. How is it fair on them? Surely it’s reasonable for them to insist that the information, information they invested time and money to create, that information cannot go to their competitors?

No.

It’s not their information. Whatever the ToS says. It’s only a matter of time before that wall comes crumbling down.

So what’s going to happen next? I guess that “vendors” that act as information stewards will go one of three ways:

  • Privacy Premium: This is where the ToS agrees that it’s your information, but indicates that you have to pay a small fee for private use. They don’t claim any right to sell on the information, but ask for costs to be met when they have to package it for your (external) use. They still have complete internal rights for using the information they hold to “sell” to you, to “cross-sell” you, to “target” you, and do all sorts of weird and nasty things to you. But that’s normal.
  • Advertising Allowance: Here they won’t charge you for “your” information, provided you don’t mind receiving it in a corrupted form: the primary form is where you get the information for free, but it’s embedded with advertising; the secondary form is where you get the information clean, but they’ve got your permission to sell your details to others.
  • Service With A Smile: It’s yours to do with it what you want, completely liquid. But there’s a transaction fee any time you want to do something with the information.

All that’s fine, I hear you say, but that’s information shared between vendor and vendee. Caveat emptor. What about the cases where it’s even more complex to work out ownership? Like Friend Wheels? Where someone spends time and money creating relationship diagrams and graphical representations of all the people you know and they know and they know and and and? Who owns that?

There’s a lot for us to work out, for sure. We’re still in early days as far as information ownership is concerned, but the direction is clear.

Information is going to be like money. And we’re going to move it around like money. [We already are.] Institutions that hold information are going to be like banks. With a variety of services, and with rights and duties associated with our information, varying according to the service we sign up for.

  • Safety deposit boxes for information. They hold it, they can’t touch it, we pay a fee.
  • Current or checking accounts for information: They have limited rights to doing stuff with the information, and in exchange they pay us peanuts for it; but they don’t charge us for moving the information around.
  • Information deposit accounts: Here they pay us a lot of “interest” for the information they hold on our behalf, but we don’t have the freedom to move it around willy-nilly without penalty; there are also transaction fees.
  • Managed investments: Here they are able to give us even higher rates of “interest”; they not only pay us for the information they hold on our behalf, but beyond that, they also create new things as a result of “investing” that information, and share some element of the proceeds with us.

And guess what? In order to do all this, we’re going to have to solve two other things. Identity. Trust. Both of these are problems we have already sought to solve before. In the banking world.

Banking is about information. Markets are digital.